Marble Blast Hills

Trace that terrain is awesomesauce man

Woo, great job, Trace! Though I did find one of the tiles misaligned:



Other than that, the terrain seems to be perfect. Now it's time for me to get to work creating something of that level!

Also, that island terrain looks insane. How many brushes are even in there? Does it convert?

Okay, I know this is a double-post, but I do have some new content!

Here's my attempt at creating a smooth, grassy hill:











This time I used 4x4 tiles but kept the grid scaling to 0.05. It took me a while, but the result was a rather smooth-looking hill. I find it's important to minimise sharp shifts in elevation of any single vertex in order to avoid the bad shadows from previous attempts. It does take a good deal of time, but that seems to be required to make the hill look nice. I think that the key to making large expanses of terrain like this will probably be to make a few terrains like this in size and just string them together (they are tile-able).

Also, it's insanely fun to roll around on.

Hope the posts in this thread get even better! Can't wait to see what will come next.

Mar 3, 2013, 11:05am, frublox wrote:Woo, great job, Trace! Though I did find one of the tiles misaligned:



Other than that, the terrain seems to be perfect. Now it's time for me to get to work creating something of that level!

Also, that island terrain looks insane. How many brushes are even in there? Does it convert?

8191 brushes, yes it does convert.


Mar 3, 2013, 5:50am, rdsempire wrote:Trace pretty much won this thread. Really amazing work on that (i bet it took many hours to make that crazy hill one) and i think its as far as we can go in this direction...

Took maybe 10 minutes, but I'm not giving up my secrets just yet (hint- I made it off a heightmap and then textured it.)

=p

Yeah, I try to limit each map I make to <1000 brushes, to keep things manageable. One of the problems with creating really custom terrain is the sheer amount of brushes it takes, and Marble Blast (nor Constructor, from my experience) doesn't like that.

Either way, I just hope you'll eventually reveal your technique, as I currently don't know how to incorporate heightmap into Constructor. It seems like it'd be a huge contribution to map-making.

Mar 3, 2013, 1:33pm, frublox wrote:=p

Yeah, I try to limit each map I make to <1000 brushes, to keep things manageable. One of the problems with creating really custom terrain is the sheer amount of brushes it takes, and Marble Blast (nor Constructor, from my experience) doesn't like that.

Either way, I just hope you'll eventually reveal your technique, as I currently don't know how to incorporate heightmap into Constructor. It seems like it'd be a huge contribution to map-making.


Yea, I've tried making maps with 32k brushes but unfortunately map2dif doesnt like 16 mb map files

With all of those brushes, has anybody had any lag on their system from the massive amounts of rendering those convexs on the interiors? I know we pretty much have high-ended systems, but I wonder how these would work on slower, older computers.

If you're talking about my terrains, then no, I don't think so. I believe the maximum number of brushes I have used in any terrain in this topic is around 600, which seems to be a reasonable amount, considering many mid-sized levels have more than that. There actually aren't a lot of complicated surfaces in the maps, which is one of the reasons it converts so well. Complicated terrains tend to be very sketchy with Map2Dif anyway, and most causes of lag are from brush count.

Trace's grassy terrain seems to run quite well, too. However, I do wonder about his island terrain with 8k brushes. That certainly seems like it'd need a high-end computer.

Mar 3, 2013, 2:23pm, frublox wrote:
Trace's grassy terrain seems to run quite well, too. However, I do wonder about his island terrain with 8k brushes. That certainly seems like it'd need a high-end computer.
Easy game. Converting is super fast and it should load totally fine in game. As i tested before with 8k square brushes (48k surfaces (96k triangle surfaces)) MB sometimes loaded level sometimes didn't and crashed. Thats the approximate limit to how much faces MB can handle I assume because nor Map2dif or constructor crashed at that point. (Tho constructor was struggling to save 8k brush map) and my computer wasn't even that high end... I consider it middle level gaming PC...

@Trace: cr@p I assumed you were using some sort of hacks but didn't believed you found some script that converts heightmap into so good triangle brushes

Mar 3, 2013, 11:05am, frublox wrote:Woo, great job, Trace! Though I did find one of the tiles misaligned

There were 3 of them actually

Mar 3, 2013, 6:50pm, admin wrote:
Mar 3, 2013, 11:05am, frublox wrote:Woo, great job, Trace! Though I did find one of the tiles misaligned

There were 3 of them actually

It seems you have a sharper eye than even I, my good sir.

(that was supposed to be a quote-like thing, except it's not really quoted from anything)

Anyway, Trace's island map (from what I read) seems to be indeed pushing MB's power to have all of these complex structures and faces. I feel like if we want to go further without requiring every player to have a serious pc that can handle things like this, then we'd have to start using modelling programmes to do it. By that point this thread is kind of over, since the whole point was to use Constructor. (mainly to see how far Constructor can go with Marble Blast)

Mar 3, 2013, 9:34pm, frublox wrote:
Mar 3, 2013, 6:50pm, admin wrote:

There were 3 of them actually

It seems you have a sharper eye than even I, my good sir.

(that was supposed to be a quote-like thing, except it's not really quoted from anything)

Anyway, Trace's island map (from what I read) seems to be indeed pushing MB's power to have all of these complex structures and faces. I feel like if we want to go further without requiring every player to have a serious pc that can handle things like this, then we'd have to start using modelling programmes to do it. By that point this thread is kind of over, since the whole point was to use Constructor. (mainly to see how far Constructor can go with Marble Blast)

I'm just letting you know the way I do it has complete control over the number of triangles and the size of each one. Could make a map any size with any numbers of triangles, it all just depends on what the maker wants to do. For instance here's a picture of a heightmapped Australia, only using 1.1k brushes. So yes, you could make any map with any size you wanted, it just depends on how smooth you want to make it. (P.S. I'm not using only constructor )



And now I present to you, (with a lot of debugging help from Matan) the largest map ever /hurr! If this map doesn't lag your computer, nothing that I would ever reasonably create will.

www.mediafire.com/?h48wt9n3i42oau7

Semi-related proof of concept: var pb_ad_url = ads.proboards.com/ad.pl?as=300x250&ap=BT...15&cb=+Math.random() ; document.write('');

K lets not make this secret to anyone shall we (not like that D3D ''hack'' showcase you did no offence) so the program he used was this nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?c=2#p2
The program has been mostly used by old counter strike map makers (because they were at same situation as are we now without possibility to make heightmap normally in program).
Funniest part is that i'm failing to export my terrain without lots and lots of brushes going out of control or game crashing after passing certain distance (i bet i messed something up with settings). But its really fun to play around that program.
Also i heavily warn you. If exporter gives you tons of errors (and process continues) and if you click exit button it still doesn't close exporter and it will error till it stops (lagging computer at that point) (also im exporting directly through constructor but thing sould be the same to: drop map in map2dif.exe users). Only way to stop it is through task manager process list.

Mar 4, 2013, 10:32am, rdsempire wrote:K lets not make this secret to anyone shall we (not like that D3D ''hack'' showcase you did no offence) so the program he used was this nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?c=2#p2
The program has been mostly used by old counter strike map makers (because they were at same situation as are we now without possibility to make heightmap normally in program).
Funniest part is that i'm failing to export my terrain without lots and lots of brushes going out of control or game crashing after passing certain distance (i bet i messed something up with settings). But its really fun to play around that program.
Also i heavily warn you. If exporter gives you tons of errors (and process continues) and if you click exit button it still doesn't close exporter and it will error till it stops (lagging computer at that point) (also im exporting directly through constructor but thing sould be the same to: drop map in map2dif.exe users). Only way to stop it is through task manager process list.

Damnit, I've been found out

However, I've never had a problem with exporting anything and anything hanging. I don't know what settings you are using, or what version of map2dif, but you shouldn't have to kill anything using task manager.

You can technically use any size map with any number of triangles, it all depends on how much work you want to do splitting it up.

(You're exporting it in Hammer 220 .map format right?)



(D3D hack is just getting ENB Series to work on marble blast)

Wow! That's insanely cool! I had a feeling it had something to do with this, and when you mentioned heightmaps it all sort of fit together. I'm still figuring out how to use the tool (the first terrain I've created couldn't convert with Map2Dif), so I'd appreciate any pointers. Mainly how to get textures into it, as I can't seem to figure that out.

Great tool, and it definitely is a big contribution.

Also, that huge map you linked ran great for me. No extra loading time and it ran smoothly when I played it.

^make sure you use map splitter by otto for excessive sized maps. I suggested that to trace too.

My map was relatively small (I think), less than 2k brushes. Mainly got the vislink and bad winding errors.

Mar 4, 2013, 5:19pm, frublox wrote:Wow! That's insanely cool! I had a feeling it had something to do with this, and when you mentioned heightmaps it all sort of fit together. I'm still figuring out how to use the tool (the first terrain I've created couldn't convert with Map2Dif), so I'd appreciate any pointers. Mainly how to get textures into it, as I can't seem to figure that out.

Great tool, and it definitely is a big contribution.

Also, that huge map you linked ran great for me. No extra loading time and it ran smoothly when I played it.

How to add textures: imgur.com/a/4ulWH

Mar 4, 2013, 5:37pm, jeff wrote:^make sure you use map splitter by otto for excessive sized maps. I suggested that to trace too.

I did a better map split yesterday for trace, and also his original one worked as-is without splits.

Mar 4, 2013, 11:07pm, admin wrote:
Mar 4, 2013, 5:37pm, jeff wrote:^make sure you use map splitter by otto for excessive sized maps. I suggested that to trace too.

I did a better map split yesterday for trace, and also his original one worked as-is without splits.

Just lots of holes. However a massive map with 8k brushes in a single map file I think holes would be expected

But yes, if you're making the map right you shouldn't be getting conversion errors.

Mar 4, 2013, 10:42pm, conor wrote:
Mar 4, 2013, 5:19pm, frublox wrote:Wow! That's insanely cool! I had a feeling it had something to do with this, and when you mentioned heightmaps it all sort of fit together. I'm still figuring out how to use the tool (the first terrain I've created couldn't convert with Map2Dif), so I'd appreciate any pointers. Mainly how to get textures into it, as I can't seem to figure that out.

Great tool, and it definitely is a big contribution.

Also, that huge map you linked ran great for me. No extra loading time and it ran smoothly when I played it.

How to add textures: imgur.com/a/4ulWH

Thanks!

EDIT: Now I just need to figure out how to convert it through Map2Dif. Tried splitting up the map but that didn't work.

Are you using m2d+ or just regular m2d? it won't work on m2d.

still having problems on normal terrains using m2d+ (lots of weird brushes). Has anyone tried luck on Diffix2?

I'm using the marbleblast Map2Dif. Should I not be?

There's a m2d+ which is better for brushes of these types (mass triangles). However you still need to be aware on how to split maps properly. Maybe trace will release 1up with the splits ive done and the original map.

There's another one for Marble Blast? I haven't heard about it. Also, where would I get it?

What do you mean splitting up the map properly? I just cut and paste halves of the map into different map files.

Beats me. You could click here and find out though. And clicking here would lead you to DifFix2.

Splitting up map: yes, cut and paste is the method I use but not halves, I just cut like 6-8 rows from the top, then the next 6-8 etc. If the end result for new map files from such split is 700-1000kbs then it's good. Any more and you're risking errors.

What torque are you using? I'm not good with torque

Hypersonic, please read the thread carefully before making a response. You could also learn what programs we're using based on this thread and you would have learned this has nothing to do with the Torque Game Engine itself, but programs and components created for it as well as other programs being utilised.

Ah, thanks, will try it out later on. The terrain I'm testing is less than 1000 kb without splits, so would that cause any issues?

That map2dif seems like it'll be VERY useful. Though I haven't experimented much with serious curves and crazy interiors, that and seizure's methods might give me some incentive to do so.